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Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses.

2015-09-30 | 3599 Print PDF

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Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses.

As a small business owner, when targeting a Market you need to be certain to some extent that your product or services will get to the right audience, to do this you will need to develop marketing strategies, hence a valuable and vital question you should be asking yourself is who are your prospective clients?

If you can provide a concrete answer to that question then you have solved one of the major problems in developing a marketing campaign.
Before building a Marketing Strategy for your small businesses you need to understand some key points, you might have some targeted marketing lists you like to build a marketing campaign around, but with out understanding the simple concept of this key points your marketing campaign will not be successful. 

 

Key Points To Note For Effective Market Strategy.

"People don't buy products they buy benefits and solutions they will enjoy". "Marketing now also involves finding ways to turn one time purchasers into life long customers".

The Pareto Principle (80/20% rule in selling & buying)

"The top 20% of sales people make 80% of the money and vice versa". The principle also applies to the top 20% of sales people. "The top 20% of the top 20%, which equals the top 40%, earn 80% of the money in the top 20% of the sales people". Which means in every large sales force, four or five people out of one hundred makes as many sales and earns as much money as all the rest put together.
Now, fully 80% of the buying decision will be concentrated on 20% of the benefits that is offered to the prospects. Sometimes 90/10 rule is effective, 90% of the sales decision can be based on 10% of the features and benefits of the product/service.

 

Thinking Creatively.

Prospecting new product uses and applications either via targeted web marketing or targeted marketing lists there are some insightful questions you need to find answers to a successful targeted marketing campaign.
I have listed some of this basic questions that are universally applicable and will be one of the questions you will need to answer to create your targeted marketing strategy.
1.) What are the most attractive features of your product or service?
2.) What specific needs of prospective customers does the product or service satisfy?
3.) What does the product or service offer that other competitors do not offer?

 

Tailoring The Product or Service.

Merchandise that is generally similar in style or design, but may vary in such elements as size, price and quality is collectively known as product line.
Therefore product line must be closely correlated with consumers needs and wants. This will promote the product life cycle.
So with this you can easily search a pipe line of other products from other competitors that fall under your product line and do a research on them to know how they started, what went wrong and how they successful executed their targeting marketing strategy for their products or services.
Using a comparison chart or table easily shows the benefits, uniqueness and competitive advantage that a customer would choose a product over that of the competitors.
For instance the video advert of Honda VS Toyota, a car race advert on AUDI,BMW, and BENZ (am sure you must have watched the transporter).

 

Targeted Marketing Strategy Case Study.

Apple computer was the first company to crack the market for the small personal or business computer. They came out of the gate with a user friendly personal computer and immediately took the lead in the market, selling hundreds of thousands of APPLE ONE'S AND APPLE TWO'S.
Microsoft entered the market after Apple, determined to catch up and surpass Apple's sales volume. But instead of developing computers, Microsoft focused on software, on the operating systems and encouraged other software developers to develop programs compatible with theirs.
The strategies of the two companies were completely different, Apple was determined to keep all its operating codes and hardware proprietary so that it could charge higher prices and make higher profits. At its peak, Apple was earning 49% net of profit on sales, an incredible amount.

 

A Different Marketing Strategy.

Microsoft under Bill Gate and Steve Ballmer, decided to offset the competitive advantage of Apple's user friendly software by opening up its codes to software developers world wide. Simultaneously, with each new advance in technology, Microsoft lowered the price of its MS-DOS operating system. Rather than focusing on high profits per individuals sale, Microsoft focused on volume sales with a lower profit per sale but a far greater number of sales.
By the time the dust had settled, Microsoft controlled 90% of the global PC Market. After becoming a runaway success story, Apple was surpassed in the market and never caught up,  by 2004, Apple's market plus share was down to 30% even though its products are judged by many people to be technologically superior to those of Microsoft.
What or Who your competitor and how you are going to position your product or service against them?

This kind of marketing strategy can also be seen with NINTENDO VS SEGA next NINTENDO VS PLAYSTATION and XBOX VS PLAYSTATION, similar attributes with smart phones IOS vs Andriods.

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